Six Mile Baptist Church has always been a rural, small-town church with deep roots in the community going back to its founding in 1836. It is a church filled with hard-working people from all walks of life. The church is blessed with people of many skills and abilities, plugging along in peaceful anonymity in the Upstate.

At one time, these people sent mission teams all over the United States to help in numerous ways, from construction and Vacation Bible School to coastal hurricane and disaster relief efforts. However, time and circumstance had a way of forcing other issues to prominence in church life, and one thing that waned along the path of time was a missional mindset.

The church reestablished a limited missions program by participating with another church in an annual mission trip to the Dominican Republic. As missionaries returned with tales of the trip, including salvation and baptism tallies and stories of people flocking to the medical clinics, interest in missions began to rekindle. Soon the church decided to fill a void in the ministerial staff by calling a retired music missionary and pastor to lead the music and missions programs. Since then, the church has adopted the Acts 1:8 strategies for its own.

Members have taken mission teams to Goose Creek and Lynch, Ky., to do construction, clothing, food pantry and children’s ministry activities. The youth are participating in associational mission projects and local ministry projects at homeless shelters, food pantries and soup kitchens. As a direct result of these mission efforts, the men’s and women’s ministries have grown and are providing ministry assistance in the local community and surrounding environs.

I participated in a mission trip to Cange, Haiti, in conjunction with the World Health Organization in August 2008. Following a visioning trip I took to Peru, Six Mile Church entered into a three-year partnership agreement with REAP North to present three leadership development conferences in Tarma, Peru. These efforts will focus on providing basic and advanced discipleship training to groups that will take the training back to their home villages. In July, a team of missionaries will spend a week conducting classes and assisting the church in Peru.

Our church is still involved in the annual Dominican Republic trip, but now offers a smorgasbord of local, state, national and international missions involvement that not only fits different budgets and time constraints, but also matches the various skills and abilities of members.

To fulfill the strategy of Acts 1:8, Six Mile Church has found that we must be willing to get outside the walls of worship to satisfy the needs of ministry. Our people have truly experienced the saying: “When God calls, he provides.” God is calling all of us to fields ready for harvest. The church of the living God must respond by realizing the needs all around us with a willingness to share the gospel of Christ and his life with everyone we encounter. That’s what Acts 1:8 is all about.

Longenecker is pastor of Six Mile Baptist Church.